Conspiracy Theories, Skepticism, and Critical Thinking

One movie/television trope that I despise is when the villain in the story is needlessly evil. I don’t mean that they torture someone for the sake of torturing, but when they are over the top evil to the point where they use “evil” synonyms or they only eat “devilled eggs.” Dean Anderson, Mike’s recruiter is an example of this: “ You’ve been a good slave, Mike .” Warnke isn’t a slave and nothing that Warnke has told us should lead us to think that he even thought that. Warnke has been getting paid for his services, sometimes in cash and other times in drugs; but he’s not a slave by any means. Warnke just adds this bit because Anderson is evil so he can’t just say “you’ve been doing good Mike.” Anderson reveals that he’s a “Master Counselor,” which is sounds like some assistant regional manager type bullshit. Anderson tells him he’s about to get into the inner circle. The real inner circle, not the fake one that he was inducted into last week. He gets a robe (we’re slowly wading int...

  Note for new readers: page numbers are based on the PDF of the book found at the internet archive. “ One might see in these events a quickening of the conflict between good and evil, light and darkness, God and Satan.” The events he lists are the civil rights movement, the Watts Riot, a massive power blackout in the Northeast US and Southeast Canada (it only lasted 13 hours), and the Pope visited the US for the first time. He phrases the Watts Riots as a white guy in the 1960s, so I’m actually prepared to let that one go—as he’s probably only getting the official story and not the LAPD doing LAPD things. Aside from that, there’s no good versus evil battles here. He calls 1965 the downward pivot in world history and he’s not talking about music. He sees a blossoming world of drug use which to him says, “ Evil seemed to be afoot on Planet Earth.” This book is charting a clear path: alcohol à marijuana à “drugs” à Satanism. The point of the book is to illustrate that if lit...

I will begin by confessing that I’ve never been a drug user. I drink alcoholic beverages; I used to smoke cigarettes/vape; but the closest experience I have to drug use was getting contact high at a party. I confess this because I don’t have the personal knowledge of what it’s like to be on “drugs” but I also have a good idea that Warnke doesn’t either. This entire next section reads like someone trying to convince us way too hard that he was on drugs. The biggest clue is that I have plenty of alcohol experience and Warnke’s description of drinking doesn’t make sense. He knows that people who drink too much vomit, so in order to convince us that he was totally drunk all the time, we left off with him leaving class to go throw up. What Warnke doesn’t understand is that if you’re so drunk that you feel the need to throw up all the time, you also aren’t going to be able to do many other things—like walk around, attend classes, or convince someone that you aren’t drunk. I know that somet...

  We’re in California and Mike Warnke is a bit bored. Not actually bored because he’s going to parties, clubs, bars, cafés, and hooking up with either one girl or many girls. He, however, claims to be bored because he needs a reason to claim that he began drinking. I don’t know what the word is, but Warnke is “regret bragging.” This is when someone acts regretful about their past behavior but also touts how good they were at it. He drank so much and hooked up with so many girls he knew was wrong, but he was just so awesome at it. Last post he was going back to visit his relatives back in the Midwest. If you’re thinking that he’s going to have a confrontation with his Protestant aunts, you are thinking just like I did, and you would be wrong. His trip back is covered in a sentence where he notices that his life in California was just so much better. Mike, however, can’t just enjoy his life. He’s got to be a gadfly to the Catholic religion teachers that he was so enamored with tw...

  Writing a long narrative is difficult. You have to keep track of many different things, especially when you’re dealing with internal thoughts. I keep a small B5 sized notebook for important notes when I’m writing. It would have served Warnke to do something like this too because chapter 2 has a few contradictions that simple note taking would have resolved. “California isn’t a state, it’s an experience.” I think Governor Schwarzenegger used this as a slogan, which makes me think that Warnke didn’t come up with it. Warnke has left the Midwest and is now living in (or near) San Bernadino California with the Papists. The first few pages he’s describing the San Bernadino valley and it’s not a bad job of laying out the environment. I might be overly picky here but I think that this belonged in the chapter where he moved to California. I get that he’s setting the stage for the California bit, it seems like he realized he forgot like a a person telling a joke and then going back “t...

  “ They made dark threats about fire and brimstone if I didn’t shape up to Jesus. “Who’s that?” I wondered. One of my favorite questions to ask Christians who are trying to convince me with Bible quotes is, “Who do you think isn’t aware of Jesus?” If you live in an English-speaking country and have not heard about Jesus I’m very curious about you. I’m an atheist, my children do not go to church, and they know about Jesus because they live in a Christian culture. Warnke lives in the Midwest and even if his dad was the gun-toting badass that Warnke portrayed him as, he knows who Jesus is. The “they” in that sentence are Warnke’s two aunts who are going to raise him after the funeral. This is the 1950s and I guess custody just goes to whoever calls “dibs.” The aunts have him to fill with fear of Evangelical Jesus when in 1959 Warnke’s half-sister and husband explain to the aunts that they had secret dibs and were going to take Mike to San Bernadino California. There’s just one pr...